Barton: 'Conspiracy Mentalities Are a Bad Deal'

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Friday, 3/22/2013 2:51 pm

On the weekly "Good News Friday" episode of "WallBuilders Live" today, David Barton cited a poll supposedly showing that a majority of Americans believe that the government poses a threat to their rights and freedoms, which he suggested is a good thing because it meant that there was also a majority of citizens who would be willing to stand up and push back.

But there was also a danger, Barton warned, in that it could lead people to fear the government which, in turn, leads to conspiracy theories:

I think fear causes you to do a lot of things. Conspiracy mentalities are a bad deal. We're told in Isaiah 8:11 not to call conspiracy everything that everybody else calls conspiracy ... The problem with conspiracy is that faith is actually fear and if you have a lot of faith, that is having fear. Job said "that which I feared has come upon me;" it's like having faith for bad stuff to happen.

...

A lot of times when you get a conspiratorial mentality, it causes you to act in ways that the conspiracy actually becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think on the one hand, as long as we have a health skepticism of government and Washington and their ability and, actually, their efforts right now to take power, I think that that's healthy so long as it doesn't turn into fear that becomes conspiratorial and phobic which then drives us to do things that causes Washington to really come after us.